History
Remains have been found from the Mid-Neolithic Age (about 3000 BC), the late Neolithic Age (about 2000 BC), the early to late Bronze Age of coastal South China (1500-500 BC), the period of the Warring States to the Han Dynasty (206 BC -220 AD), the Tang Dynasty (618-917 AD) and the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911 AD).
Complete Neolithic human skeletal remains were found in tombs at Tung Wan Tsai in 1997. (Ref. The Antiquities and Monuments Office of the Home Affairs Bureau)
The prehistoric island had late neolithic inhabitants as proved by recent excavations. There were also inhabitants here during the Han Dynasty. More recently in the last 250 years it was a small fishing village named Tin Liu, only accessible by boats or ferries. It was founded by a Chan family from Tsing Yi island.
Ma Wan once had a Customs house, still recorded by a stone monument named "Kowloon Gate" monument. (see it near to the old Rural Committee). It ceased activity on October 4, 1899
Foreign visitors in 1794.
24 housing units donated by Americans in 1965 (see them on a top of a hill near to the Fishermen's association)
As of 1995, fish farming was the predominant economic activity on Ma Wan.
Ma Wan had a population of 800 in 2000. With the development of the Park Island apartment complex, villagers were rehoused in the northern part of the island. As part of the compensation package, they could choose either a 3-storey traditional village house of 2,100 sq ft or 3 separate units, each of 700 sq ft in one single block.
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“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)